Frederick Davidson

Originally published in serial form in 1884 to 1885, "Germinal" is Émile Zola's realistic depiction of the coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s. In this faithful translation from the original French by Havelock Ellis, the story centers on Étienne Lantier, a young migrant worker who arrives at the coalmining town of Montsou in search of work. Set against a backdrop of extreme poverty and oppression, "Germinal" is the story of the idealistic...

In the last of his World War I adventures, Richard Hannay undertakes his most dangerous assignment yet When England calls, Richard Hannay answers. Not yet forty and already a brigadier general, he has led the charge into some of the fiercest fighting of World War I: Loos, the Somme, Arras. There is no telling how far up the ranks he might climb if only the Foreign Office would stop taking him off the front lines for cloak and dagger work. Adding insult...

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is a novel by English author E.M. Forster. The work was Forster's first novel, and its success helped launch his lengthy and critically acclaimed career as a writer of literary fiction. Where Angels Fear to Tread, the title is drawn from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711), is a moving meditation on class, gender, social convention, and the grieving process. Following the death of her husband, a widow named...

Featuring ten works of comedic short fiction, P.G Wodehouse's The Clicking of Cuthbert is comprised of stories about golfers that teach a lesson is an odd and amusing way. In A Woman is Only a Woman, the friendship between two men is threatened when they both fall in love with the same woman. Since she claims to like them equally, the two men decide to challenge each other to a game of golf, agreeing that the best golfer gets the woman's hand in marriage....

Originally published in Polish in 1896 by Nobel Prize-winning author Henryk Sienkiewicz, "Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero" is the story of a love that develops in Rome between a young Christian woman, Lygia, and Marcus Vinicius, a Roman patrician, during the reign of Nero in 64 AD. The title "Quo Vadis" is translated from Latin as "Where are you going?" The quote is a reference to the New Testament verse John 13:36, which states "Simon...

Samuel Butler was an individualistic Victorian era writer who published a variety of works. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, considerable studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history as well as criticism. Butler even made prose translations of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" which remain some of the most popular to this day. His authority on literature came through his posthumous novel, "The...

First published in 1925, "Carry On, Jeeves" is P. G. Wodehouse's third collection of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster stories. All of the stories included in this volume first appeared in periodicals like the "Saturday Evening Post" including some that are reworked versions of stories that appeared in the 1919 collection "My Man Jeeves". In this volume, readers will find some of Wodehouse's most famous tales of the hapless and wealthy Bertie, his equally...

It wasn't Archie's fault really. It's true he went to America and fell in love with Lucille, the daughter of a millionaire hotel proprietor, and if he did marry her- well, what else was there to do? From his point of view, the whole thing was a thoroughly good egg; but Mr. Brewster, his father-in-law, thought differently. Archie had neither money nor occupation, which was distasteful in the eyes of the industrious Mr. Brewster, but the real bar was...

Mr. William Whittlestaff was strolling very slowly up and down the long walk at his countryseat in Hampshire, thinking of the contents of a letter, which he held crushed up within his trousers' pocket. He always breakfasted exactly at nine, and the letters were supposed to be brought to him at a quarter past. The postman was really due at his hall-door at a quarter before nine; but though he had lived in the same house for above fifteen years, and...

Arthur Conan Doyle's His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes(1917) is an outstanding collection of some of the later stories and most dramatic exploits of Detective Holmes and Dr. Watson. These stories were composed between 1908 and 1917, with the exception of the infamous tale "The Cardboard Box", which was written in 1893. Six of these adventures were initially published The Strand magazine, and the final titular story was published...